Like most of you, I used reddit as solely my only source for finding information. Looking to hear your guys’ thoughts on this topic, and hopefully explain and share some knowledge in a more sophisticated manner than I can describe. (also, I hope this is an appropriate place to post?)

I have ran into this discussion a few times across the fediverse, but I can’t for the life of my find those threads and comments lol

I believe that a non-corporate owned platform with user-generated information is most optimal, like wikipedia. I don’t know the technicalities, but I feel like AI can’t replace answers from human experiences - humans who are enthusiasts and care about helping each other and not making money. This is one of those things where I feel like I know the “best” way to find information, but I don’t know the deep answers of why, and what makes the other platforms worse (aside from the obvious ads, bloatware, and corporate greed)

I don’t know much about this topic, but I’m curious if you guys have actual real answers! Thread-based services like this and stack overflow (?) vs chatgpt vs bing vs google, etc.

EDIT: Wow, all your responses are fantastic. I’m not very knowledgeable about the subject so I can’t really continue everyone’s responses with a discussion, but I love and appreciate the insight in this thread! But I’ll try to think of some follow up questions :)

  • Julian
    2·
    1 year ago

    The worst part about ai as a search engine is that it doesn’t (or at least can’t reliably) give you the original source. It can tell you lots of stuff but there’s no link to a news article or wiki page where it got it from. A traditional search engine can give you unreliable results, but at least you can look at them yourself and decide if they’re reliable or not. An AI search engine has you just take what it says at face value, true or not.